Gerald’s eyes filled.
“Before I knew your face.”
I turned away, but he had already seen me cry so many times that pride felt pointless.
My phone buzzed constantly during that first week.
Mother.
Father.
Claire.
Unknown relatives.
Family friends.
Messages arrived dressed as concern and armed like knives.
Your mother is devastated.
You need to think about Claire’s stress.
This is not the time for drama.
Whatever happened, Eleanor raised you.
A mother’s love is complicated.
You only get one family.
The old me would have answered every message. Explained. Apologized. Smoothed the jagged edges of their discomfort with pieces of myself.
The new me gave the phone to Gerald.
“Can you put it in that drawer?” I asked.
He did.
Then he said, “There’s a button that blocks numbers.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to use it today.”
“I know.”
“But one day, you might like the sound of silence.”
He was right.
By the time I was discharged, I had blocked my mother, my sister, and six relatives whose names I only heard when someone needed something.
I did not block Richard.
I didn’t know why.
Maybe because some small, foolish part of me still hoped he would call without my mother’s script in his mouth.
He did not.
Gerald took me home from the hospital.
Not to my apartment.
My apartment was on the third floor of a building with no elevator, and Dr. Reeves had made it clear that climbing stairs after abdominal surgery was a terrible idea.
So Gerald brought me to his house.
I had expected something sad and lonely. A bachelor’s cave. A place with old newspapers and dim rooms.
Instead, Gerald Maize lived in a small white house with blue shutters, a vegetable garden, and wind chimes that sang whenever the breeze moved. The living room smelled faintly of cedar and coffee. There were books everywhere, stacked in uneven towers. A quilt lay folded over the back of the couch.
“This was my mother’s,” he said, touching the quilt. “She would have liked you.”
The guest room had fresh sheets and a vase of daisies on the dresser.
“I asked Ruth what people put in a guest room,” he admitted. “She said flowers. I said, ‘What kind?’ She said, ‘Not funeral ones.’ So I panicked at the grocery store.”
I looked at the daisies and smiled.
“They’re perfect.”
That first night, I woke around 3 a.m. drenched in sweat, heart racing, convinced I was back on the floor of my apartment with my body turning against me.